Sonny\'s Blues Imprisonment in \"Sonny\'s

Sonny's Blues

Imprisonment in "Sonny's Blues"

There are a several large themes at work in James Baldwin's short story "Sonny's Blues." Simply on a surface level, it deals with issues of family obligations vs. personal independence, drug addiction, and race -- not exactly in terms of direct inequality, but in the struggle of the African-American community in Harlem to provide real opportunities to its next generation. These issues are also symbolically dealt with through Sonny's music and his heroin addiction, which are seen often as more parallel than oppositional. A common motif in all of these issues, both in life and in the story, is a sense of being trapped or imprisoned, which is the flip=side of being in control. Instead of having true powers of self-direction and choice, the characters in the story -- Sonny, his brother the narrator, and several other tangential characters -- are all trapped by a world that forces them to make certain choices and to behave in certain ways, and that will not let them escape.

One passage that clearly illustrates this feeling of imprisonment comes quite early in the story, setting up the motif right from the beginning moments of the story. After learning that his brother has been arrested for something related to his heroine use, the narrator reflects on the boys of Harlem that he tries to teach algebra to in his job as a school teacher: "These boys, now, were living as we'd been living then, they were growing up with a rush and their heads bumped abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities" (Baldwin par. 5). This passage makes it explicitly clear that the themes of imprisonment, struggle, and hopelessness are not unique to the main characters of the story, but in fact extend with the same level of intensity and detail to the entire community of Harlem.

This passage also, of course, reflects Sonny's particular struggle. He tells his brother at one point that the feeling heroine gave him at many times was a feeling of being in control, and that it was important for him to have that feeling sometimes. The rest of the world, it is made clear, does not actually give either sonny or his brother a great deal of control, and though both brothers join the military during "the war" (presumably World War II), there is no sense of a wider world of possibilities, but only the darkness and bleakness that exists in Harlem. Heroine provided a sense of control, perhaps, but it is obviously a false impression -- it is actually the cause of Sonny's true, physical imprisonment. It can be seen as part of the ceiling that the young men of Harlem bump their heads into as they grow up in a rush -- drugs are a part of what's holding the community back.